Frog Hair to Woolies: Dust Bunnies by 173 Other Names

Regional Dictionary Travels America; New England's Willywags

By

Ryan Sager

February 21, 2012

What do you call those soft rolls of dust that collect on the floor under your bed? Many people know them as dust bunnies. But in parts of the Northeast, you'd call them dust kitties; in the South, house moss; in Pennsylvania, you might call them woolies.

There are, in fact, at least 174 names by which Americans call these bits of fluff, including bunny tails, frog hair, cussywop, woofinpoofs and—perhaps most evocatively—ghost manure.

Beyond Woofinpoofs and Willywags

Try your hand at identifying some of the terms found in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

That we can identify these words today is largely a testament to the vision of one man:
Frederic Cassidy,
a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English (known as DARE) in a 1962 speech to the American Dialect Society.

Mr. Cassidy died in 2000, at the age of 92, having made it to "O" in his quest to catalog American English in all its rip-staving (that is Ozarkian for rip-roaring) regional diversity. His tombstone bears a simple inscription: "On to Z!"

"That was his rallying cry for about the last decade of his life," said
Joan Houston Hall,
65, who joined DARE in 1975 and took over as its chief editor after Mr. Cassidy's death. In March, Harvard University Press will publish the Dictionary's Volume V, finishing off the alphabet with slab through zydeco, nearly half a century after the first fieldworkers fanned out in "Word Wagons" to 1,002 communities across America, administering a 1,600-item questionnaire to sometimes-suspicious, often-perplexed locals.

Getty Images

The fruits of their labors have been a feast for the lexicographically inclined ever since. What does a patient in the South mean when he complains of dew poison? What does a waitress in California mean when she offers you coffee and snails? Where would you go if a New Englander directed you to the willywags?

(Answers: The patient has a rash on his feet or legs. The waitress is offering you cinnamon rolls with your cup of joe. The New Englander means what others might call the boonies.)

As the repository of answers to such questions (the dictionary contains nearly 60,000 entries and is the only project of its type that is national in scope), the folks at DARE have long acted as a clearinghouse for all sorts of odd requests, by everyone from doctors to dialogue coaches to presidents.

Ms. Hall remembers a call she took in the early 1990s from a lawyer whose client had called a former girlfriend a mud flap. Could the phrase be used as a term of endearment?

Joan Houston Hall is chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English.
Associated Press

"I could neither confirm nor deny," said Ms. Hall, who searched DARE's archives but found nothing. "It was only years later, driving down the highway behind a big truck, that I realized he may have been referring to those curvaceous silhouettes you see," Ms. Hall said. "So, I suppose that could be complimentary."

In 1992, a member of President George H.W. Bush's staff called on Mr. Cassidy when the president baffled reporters by calling an argument over who had run the first negative ad of the campaign a case of "who shot John." Mr. Cassidy found that the term originated with a children's game, an Iowa variant is "who shot the bear," and in southern Appalachia, who-shot-John is slang for corn whiskey, primarily moonshine.

The next year, reporters rang DARE when President Bill Clinton said a critic didn't know him "from Adam's off-ox." The phrase turned out to be common west of the Appalachians, meaning, "he doesn't know anything about me."

DARE has even been used to solve crimes.
Roger Shuy,
a retired forensic linguist, recounted the case of a child abduction in which the kidnapper left a note demanding ransom of $10,000, directing: "Put it in the green trash kan on the devil strip" at the corner of two streets.

The kidnapper tried to disguise his education with "kan" (elsewhere spelling "precious" correctly), but devil strip is a term for the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the roadway, one used solely in a small area around Akron. When law enforcement's suspect list included just one educated man from Akron, the police got a confession.

Some linguists worry that television and the Internet will wash away America's diverse regional vocabulary. The Subway sandwich chain, for instance, is eroding regionalisms like grinder (New England), hero (New York City), hoagie (Pennsylvania and New Jersey), zep (southeastern Pennsylvania) and spucky (Boston).

But new regionalisms are being minted. Relatively new (that is, in the last 40 years), the term skeevy has arisen primarily in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey to describe something gross or dirty. Out of Northern California, there has been hella, used as an intensifier, as in "that's hella cool."

The project was started by Frederic Cassidy, shown in 1949.
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Indeed, while some might find tweet-speak hella skeevy, it looks like the future of discovering regionalisms is online.

A paper from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010 looked at regionalisms on Twitter, using geo-tagged posts. The authors found that while Northern Californians were hella tired, New Yorkers were deadass tired. And while sumthin' means something in most cities, it is suttin' in New York City.

Erin McKean,
founder of online dictionary Wordnik, and a member of the DARE advisory board, said that Internet subcultures will increasingly be sources of new words. She points to a book, "Slayer Slang," which cataloged the jargon of online fans of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie and TV show (e.g., slayage and Buffyverse).

"These words give us a sense of kinship and belonging," she said. "It doesn't matter if we live online all the time."

While DARE isn't ready to add the Buffyverse to its roster of regions, it is launching a digital version in 2013. Beyond that, Ms. Hall would like to field an updated language survey, which would be partly conducted online.

Ms. Hall said that she now has a new motto, paying homage to Mr. Cassidy (by way of Dr. Seuss): "On Beyond Zebra!" In the spirit of Volume V, Mr. Cassidy would surely be suffancified.

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